Thursday, 9th of February, 2006

Hint: no. Blasphemy is meaningless to an atheist, and it’s offensive to pull us up for blaspheming when we don’t believe in the gods you hold so sacred.
Now, of course I’m not going to go about offending the strongly-held beliefs of people for no reason. But hey, if there is a reason, or if I’m not addressing those people and don’t feel that what I’m saying or doing is going to directly affect those people, why the hell not?

Among the feeds I’ve subscribed to in my recent feed explosion (I’ve installed a highly customised version of feed on feeds on my server) is Ophelia Benson’s Notes and Comments on the Butterflies and Wheels site. She’s a fairly extreme atheist – like me, only somewhat more strident in her expression thereof, much like the wonderful PZ Myers of Pharyngula. And she’s had some really great posts regarding that whole Muslims-and-cartoons thing.
(By no means do I agree with everything Benson says – but I’ve been rediscovering the joy of actually reading people you don’t completely agree with. It’s challenging, and I find it hard on a large scale, but that’s why blog posts are so great!)

I personally feel that the cartoons in question were rather offensive and racist, without really addressing any of the issues between the West and the extremist Muslim (“Islamist”) world. I don’t think they should have been published, and those who published them really couldn’t have expected anything other than a horrendous overreaction from said extremists.
But that’s not to say that we should just bow down to those poor offended believers-in-things. Hence the blasphemy reference above. After all, the reductio ad absurdum of the Flying Spaghetti Monster works just as well here: Shall we have to take care in our art, fiction, articles, cartoons and so on that we don’t step on any believers’ toes? Surely not – where would we stop? And if not, then why should some people’s beliefs require more care than others’?

So here’s OB on “understandism”; and here’s a rather inspiring post of hers: Ask the Women. In case you’ve been conned into thinking that “the Muslim world” just means those violent unthinking young men, go and ask the women. She links to an amazing article by German feminist Alice Schwarzer which is highly worth reading.

One Response to “Can an atheist blaspheme?”

1. Michael says:
   February 13th, 2006 at 9:17 am

   “I personally feel that the cartoons in question were rather offensive and racist”
   That’s a very all-encompasing statement. Each cartoon was done by a different artist, with different backgrounds, motives, etc. You have focused, no doubt, on the picture of Mohammed with a bomb on his head, as most of the newspapers have. But what about the others?
   Is the cartoon of Mohammad just standing in the desert racist? (Extreme Muslims certainly find it offensive, as they find *any* representation of Mohammed offensive, but do you? Do you feel offence on their behalf?)
   Or what about the cartoon of the cartoonist furtively drawing his cartoon of Mohammed. Is that racist? Hardly, I would suggest. Is it offensive? Again, only to some.
   Ohr how about the extremely abstract cartoon which combines the star and cresent with the face of Mohammed. Racist? Well, to me it harkens back to similar cartoons that used to use the hammer and sickle to mark sommething as communist. So if anything this is a political cartoon, not a racist one. And offensive? Well, it’s almost so stylised that unless you are *told* it’s a representation of Mohammed, how could you know?
   Now, as an overall body of work *perhaps* you can classify the series of comics as racist or offensive, but by looking at the whole series I think it also becomes clear that the paper was not just aiming to offend the easily offended. The “message” of some of these cartoons is more sophisticated than that.